The present disclosure relates to methods, devices and software for collecting information about consumer spending.
Various methods are used for tracking a consumer's online spending habits, for example by collecting detailed information about which products the consumer purchases online. It is also common to collect information about products which the consumer views online but does not purchase. Note that the term “product” includes any of physical objects, data products (such as music or software) or services. Online merchants can collect this information as their consumers interact with them. Internet service providers who supply the consumers with their internet access can collect this information as the consumers interact with a plurality of merchants.
By contrast, it is much harder to track the spending of a consumer who purchases products at one or more retail locations. For example, merchants may find it hard to recognize that a certain consumer makes repeated purchases. Furthermore, merchants have a natural disincentive to share any information they manage to collect about their consumers with other merchants, since this information is a valuable resource to help merchants compete with each other (e.g. to assist merchants to perform targeting marketing to attract consumers who are currently using other merchants).
Sometimes a consumer's behavior may be tracked from records of payment transactions made using a payment card, but this is harder in the case of consumers who use multiple cards, especially if the payment cards are associated with different payment networks. Tracking consumers who make payments using cash is particularly difficult.